Your viral election: Thursday, April 7

Oh, hi again. So, I had a dream last night that the election would never be over. Then I woke up sweating. I’m not actually sure if the two were related, though. As it turned out, I’d left my heating turned way up.

Let’s get on with this.

1. The NCC shows us how messaging works on Twitter

This morning, the Sun ran a story called ‘No vote for Iggy’s wife’, which had surprisingly little to do with Jarome Iginla’s wife, and a lot (read: all) to do with Zsuzzana Zsohar, wife of Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. She’s not officially a Canadian, and we all know what that means:

“Until she becomes a citizen, Zsohar cannot vote or hold some government jobs.”

Some government jobs will go unfilled!

Oh, no – I mean: a critical vote will go uncast!

And though the story might have simply ended there, the Internet, as it’s wont to do, got hold of the issue, and of course we all learned a valuable lesson in messaging.

It started when Peter Coleman, president and CEO of the National Citizens Coalition, got on his Twitter account and said this:

Right, well that might have been expected.

This, however, seemed a bit out of character for Coleman’s fellow NCC-er (and more visible Twitter user) Stephen Taylor.

Taylor’s tweet was re-tweeted a number of times. More important than the robotronic re-tweeters, though, were the people who instead simply wondered aloud to the Twitter void what that was all about?

See what he did there?

Nick Taylor-Vaisey, editor of OpenFile Ottawa did.

The CBC’s Kady O’Malley echoed Nick:

Yep, Kady, people still fall for that one. Of course, by making a point of saying that Zsohar’s citizenship should not be talked about on Twitter, it was talked about on Twitter.

And as disparaging as I’d like to be about that little move, I can’t, because here I am, devoting even more time to the whole thing in order to explain just how effective the message was. Well played, Mr. Taylor. Well played.

2. Another “disconcerting” flash mob

On Tuesday, when a reporter mentioned the term “flash mob” to Conservative John Baird, he said, “I don’t know about ‘flash’ or ‘mob’, but I don’t like the context of either word,” despite the fact that, when separated in that way, there isn’t a context for either.

In any case, somehow, despite Baird not knowing what a flash mob is, and finding the term – no matter how disjointed he could make it – totally worrying, the idea has survived, and there will be another one this weekend.

Over on ‘face’ ‘book’, students at the University of Ottawa are planning a vote mob, which I think is ultimately not quite the same thing as a flash mob (it’s in the speed, right?), but has the same purpose: promote the idea of voting to young, prematurely jaded university students.

The U of O students, who emphatically claim that their mob is non-partisan, are also making a video of the event that will be set to… uh… R. Kelly’s “The World’s Greatest” (?) because it’s 2011 and no other songs have been produced by narcissistic hip hop stars who extol their own virtues via song lyrics that could also be transposed to political events since about 1998.

3. We are literally voting, guys!

According to a site that came my way yesterday, there are 100 reasons not to vote for Stephen Harper. Did you know that? I did not know that.

100reasons.ca emphatically greets its visitors by stating that there are “literally” 100 reasons. Then it goes on to list reasons 101-107.

On the main page, visitors will find a list of numbers, each one linking to a short story about why, exactly, one should not vote for Stephen Harper.

(Along with being annoyingly imprecise in its counting and use of grammar, the site also neglects to mention that only the residents of voting age in Calgary Southwest can *actually* vote – or not, as the case may be – for Stephen Harper. The rest of you, you get to vote for boring old distilled Harper alternatives, which sort of makes you like that annoying party guest who dilutes their wine with tap water. Good grief, you are boring, wine diluter. Go home, you non-contributing, walking party foul.)

Oh yes, the 100 reasons. Well, draw your own conclusions on this one. Does it bring legitimate points forward, or is it just another hack partisan web contribution for an already crowded anti-Harper world? You decide, Canada. After all, you should be used to making decisions by now.